Kiss Me if You Can by Carly Phillips ( a review)

I got an ARC (Advance Reader Copy, aka Galley) of Kiss Me if You Can because I was the lucky blog reader whose name got pulled out of the hat. So I read it and figured I'd post a review for all five of my loyal readers, only one of whom reads romance novels.

Let me just say that I will probably pull a few punches because it was free and because the author comes across as genuinely nice.

It's OK. About 6/10. I liked it better than her "Lucky" books which were her series before this one.

The heroine seems so much more put together and balanced than what everyone says about her. I know some of that is meant to be that her family always treated her fairly shabbily because she wasn't as uptight and as much of an overachiever as her parents and sister, but it still came across as odd. She has a website business and is successful and travels a lot for the joy of it - doing some of her best work in Timbuktoo and Outer Mongolia and so on.

She always patterned herself instead on her wacky grandmother, but when Grandma ends up not having always had much of a moral code and the heroine (no, I can't remember her name) is thrown for a loop.

The hero feels like he failed at everything. He meant to be a cop, but had a shoulder injury and had to give it up. He was married to a stewardess who cheated on him and left him. He wants to be an author, not a journalist, but almost no one bought his first book and he has writer's block. His main problem with the heroine is that she likes to travel and sometimes goes on long trips, so he decides he shouldn't fall for her because she is therefore just like his ex. Neurotic much?

I mean, they almost break up because the heroine asks him to travel to Australia with her. Even if he doesn't want to quit his job so he can he becomes a fabulously rich author overnight (because surely we all know that's how it works!), surely he has some vacation time coming up? She usually travels for long periods of time, but even she should know she can take shorter trips and doesn't have to give up all travel forever.

When they have long conversations, the author pretty much says "they had a long conversation" instead of making it about anything, which would at least show us that they were sharing a bit about their interests.

They're brought together because he foils a jewelry robbery and the store owner's daughter offers him a reward, so he takes the ugliest, cheapest thing he sees, and it turns out to be a ring that was stolen in the 50's and it matches the ugly, horrid necklace that the heroine's grandmother only wears at home. He's also in the news and then featured on a blog of handsome, available bachelors (which subplot pretty much falls off the map about halfway through), and the jewelry store owner sees the ring and has to get it back so no one knows.

I felt the stolen ring plot was a bit silly, with the grandmother and her best friend providing geriatric laughs and being a bit over the top.

The sex scenes were hot, but we all know that good sex does not a great relationship make, right?

So it was a light read and a bit of fluff. Fun, but a bit frustrating.